These are manifest locally and globally, in often interconnected ways.

There are countless examples throughout the Bible and church history where the call is clear to stand and work against all kinds of systemic injustices, from out of the heart of who we are as the baptized, redeemed people of God.

These crises are not just ethical issues that the church is called to address “out there,” but they deeply infect the church itself — how it views itself, how it operates, and how the church itself is in bondage.

Through the power of the Spirit, we, the church, and the world, are transformed by God and through those, who across time, space and life situations are most different from us.

Bloomquist invited the audience to re-envision what it means to be church. “Being formed as church necessarily involves being with those who are different from ‘us.’ Further, having our perspectives transformed, we ourselves are being transformed by those who are different. They help us see what we would not otherwise see, when bound in by our own subjective-based readings of what is occurring. Being open to how others see, experience, interpret really does matter.”

She suggested that we begin with the world. “This is a significant methodological shift in theology: rather than beginning by focusing on the faith, the church, and from there to ‘the world,’ I am proposing that we begin with the world — what is going on there becomes a ‘wake up’ call to the church. The world is ‘in our face’ as a church, because the world is very much in us, whether we realize it or not. Churches that assume they are set apart from the world often operate with assumptions and practices that are more affected/shaped by the world than by biblical/theological perspectives, particularly in their quest to be ‘successful.’ It’s not that the world tells the church how to be the church, but opens up challenges that the church must engage if it is to be faithful to who it is called to be, the bearer of news that really is good today, i.e., liberating, healing, transformative of what holds us and all of creation in bondage.” She described the need to “exegete our context.”

Bloomquist continued, “An especially urgent calling of churches and religious folk is to open the space, point to the evidence and pose the critical questions. People are feeling acutely betrayed by the promises they have bought into…[provided] by large corporate interests determined to keep the market as ‘free’ as possible. Matters of basic meaning, hope and values are at stake, which should be the forte of the church. This false idolatry is exposed not primarily from top-down pronouncements, but from out of the actual contradictions as people have experienced them. The urgent pastoral task is to stand aside and open up ways for people to name, lament and rage about the contradictions between what they have been promised by this distinctly American faith and what they are actually experiencing — inviting them to lament, and rage, even outrageously so.”

Bloomquist invited the audience to engage in theological practices of subversive remembering. “We are reminded of how countercultural and even subversive were the communities gathered around Jesus…Truth telling emerges through the subversive remembering (a) of who/whose we are in relation to God, (b) of what has come before us, and (c) of the realities of our neighbors globally as well as locally. Empowered through the Holy Spirit, this has the potential to transform what is occurring in light of God’s in-breaking new reality. Subversive remembering is a theologically-empowered social practice of expressing ‘when/who/what’ has been forgotten or overlooked. It exposes our illusions, false gods and the domination (empire) and injustices they perpetuate, and impels truth-telling and organized action (resistance) for the sake of God’s world.” She added, “This occurs especially through those two practices that are central to what it means to be the church.”

Bloomquist went on to describeecclesial practices of connecting. “This implies a more communio[1] understanding of ecclesia: a worldview of relationality instead of individualism; instead of aspiring to be self-sufficient churches, our interrelatedness; instead of our strength or know-how, our vulnerability; openness to listen and learn from others, and even be transformed by those different from ourselves; shifting from the arrogance of empire and theologies of success to attitudes of humility that are shaped by a theology of the cross, and by living out the virtues advocated throughout the New Testament.”

She concluded by saying, “Seeing, remembering, connecting are simultaneously an interactive set of practices distinctive to the church, but also publically discernible to those who don’t identify with the church; therefore this might even be meaningful, persuasive to those ‘in the world,’ where they, too, join in these practices of seeing, remembering, connecting with different eyes, experiences, approaches…even through different faith lenses…and together participating in the transformation of the world.”

[1] These multi-lateral relationships and understandings have been developed, for example, through various statements and publications of the Lutheran World Federation: A Communion of Churches.